IBM lining up run at telephony, VoIP integration

IBM Lotus Wednesday introduced a slew of partners to help with its efforts to integrate traditional telephony and VoIP with collaboration software via Sametime Unified Telephony Server, which the company said will ship in July.

IBM's collaboration and voice strategy is to integrate the telephony architectures companies already have with Sametime and the rest of the IBM Lotus collaboration platform, including Notes/Domino, instant messaging/presence, social networking, conferencing and messaging software. The plan is to use open protocols and interfaces.

In his keynote address Wednesday at the VoiceCon show, Bob Picciano, general manager of IBM collaboration, unveiled the Sametime Unified Telephony Validation Program and a list of partners.

On the list of partners who have validated their wares integrate with IBM's open protocols in Sametime Unified Telephony Server (SUT) are Alcatel Lucent, Avaya, Cisco, NEC, Nortel, Mitel and Siemens; media gateway vendors Dialogic and NET; and enhanced voice quality providers GN Netcom, Plantronics, Polycom and Psytechnics. Picciano said an additional crop of partners would be announced in the coming months.

Some of the partners announced Wednesday have already been working with IBM on the evolution of Sametime, including Alcatel-Lucent, Avaya, Cisco, Nortel and Siemens.

IBM's integration strategy is in contrast to traditional rival Microsoft, which eventually hopes to supplant telephony vendors by re-inventing the PBX in software. And it is different from Cisco, which partners with IBM/Lotus but is taking a more network approach to unified communications.

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